Invisible Wounds
“The military is mostly filled with people who genuinely desire to do the right thing. More Marines receive the Medal of Honor for jumping on grenades than any other action. It’s a culture where officers eat last and everyone shares their water. These people grew up as boy scouts and girl scouts. The whole reason they volunteered was because they wanted to do the right thing. But the right thing is never clear in war. If you shoot too early, an innocent person gets killed. If you shoot too late, you lose a buddy. So a lot of our injuries are moral ones. Most of us come home feeling like we did something wrong. Or we didn’t give enough. Or that our friends gave too much. My best friend in the Marines was a guy named Ronnie Winchester. He was the nicest guy you can imagine. My 22nd birthday was during our officer training course. None of us had slept. We were all starving. We were only getting one ration per day. But Ronnie wanted to give me a memorable birthday. So he put a candle in his brownie and gave it to me. That’s how nice of a guy he was. Ronnie ended up getting killed in Iraq. And if a guy like Ronnie got killed, you can’t help but wonder why you deserve to be alive. Ronnie was 25 years old when he died. He is always going to be 25 years old. I have a wife and kids now. I get to grow old. But Ronnie Winchester is always going to be 25.”
“I went out for beers one night with my battalion commander-- Colonel Willy Buhl. He really cared about us. He was one of those leaders who’d remember the name and birthday of every man in his battalion. So we’re sitting at the bar one night, and we’re talking about all the men we’d lost to suicide. A number of Marines from our battalion had killed themselves since we’d been home. And there had been an especially bad one recently. One of our guys had shot himself with his wife and kids downstairs. Colonel Buhl and I realized that there’d soon be a point in time when we’d lost more Marines to suicide than to enemy action. And I knew we had to do something. It’s an epidemic. Every veteran knows another veteran who’s taken their own life. We have to do better. So I approached a top psychiatrist and public health expert named Dr. Ann Beeder, and I asked her a question: Can we take all the friction out of the process of getting help? The Headstrong Project was our answer to that question. We wanted to create a treatment option with zero cost and zero bureaucracy, so that a veteran’s only challenge was showing up. All they have to do is overcome the stigma of PTSD.”
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